The worst site you could possibly visit for Sim Racing news.

Reader Submission #91 – Satisfied with Mediocrity

We receive a lot of flak here at PRC.net for alleged fear-mongering about the current state of racing simulations, and those who are vocally opposed to the content on this site claim we’re approaching everything with an unwarranted pessimistic attitude. For the past several years, many virtual racing game developers have pushed out unfinished or broken titles on the unsuspecting general public, and it has been somewhat difficult to prove that there is a tangible decline in quality within the genre – fanboys often come out of hiding to claim we should feel sorry in some way for a multitude of different studios who don’t have the time, financial support, or raw manpower to create the title of our dreams.

Hello PRC! Yesterday I read a very interesting article about Italian game studio Milestone, and their plans for a successor to RIDE – a motorcycle game with huge load times on consoles, corrupted save game issues, the best of Assetto Corsa’s pre-2015 railway artificial intelligence, and extremely bad engine sounds. According to German racing game magazine SpeedManiacs, who interviewed Milestone not too long ago, Milestone have currently stuck their heads in the sand. The team from Italy believe players and press alike are satisfied with the title, and the game has exceeded their own personal expectations.

On what planet are their titles considered a success? RIDE has a Metacritic rating of 66, and only around 70% of Steam reviews are positive. Even if the sales figures seem to be somewhat okay (around 25,000 sold on Steam alone), for me it’s absolutely incomprehensible as to how a game developer with over 100 employees can think like this. As a sim racer they only appear to care about pushing out four new licensed games a year, without caring about their reputation or the quality of their software.

First of all, I guess it’s important to establish that the current climate of mainstream video game journalism – the websites which contribute to the average Metacritic score you see prominently displayed around the internet – basically won’t give any modern video game a score lower than 80%. This can be attributed to the developers themselves offering certain publications perks for giving their game an artificial score, or it can be attributed that the fear of judging a game in an honest manner, in turn risking the supply of early press copies to completely dry up. This exact scenario happened when I was over writing for RaceDepartment in 2013 – Codemasters threw a tantrum regarding my review of Grid 2, and basically pulled support from the site altogether, when they were previously big supporters of the community Mr. Hengeveld created.

With an ideal base critic score being established, and the team’s entries falling well below the average Metacritic target of 80%, for Milestone to claim they have been successful as a game developer is pretty disturbing. I’ve sat down and compiled a list of Metacritic scores featuring four of their most recent titles, and the mental gymnastics used to act like they’re somehow doing a good job is impressive to say the least:

Milestone’s response to all of this criticism, has been to stick their fingers in their ears and instead invent their own reality. This is incomprehensible. We’re talking about years worth of games that were borderline unplayable due to numerous technical issues or gameplay elements that just didn’t resonate with anyone, years worth of reviews indicating all of their projects have barely been deemed acceptable by critics and fans alike, and the company answers to all of this by literally pretending everything is fine and inventing bizarre claims that are demonstrably false. At what point do these guys wake up? What version of RIDE or Sebastien Loeb Rally Evo are they playing at their headquarters? How does a studio with over one hundred employees craft such a drastic alternative to reality? And more importantly, if the team at Milestone have found a way where they can openly laugh in the face of their remaining customers, who have undoubtedly put up with a mountain of patches and post-release beta testing just to get something that’s halfway playable, how many other companies are taking this approach as well?

Do you honestly think that the brakes in AC are made by writing max_torque=x in a file? There are more calculations/algorithms behind scene to give you that final max_torque. The things missing in there are stuff for brake temperatures and wear/fade, parameters to define the construction of the brake pads/disc.

Given that the AC forums require that you have licensed copy of AC, I wonder if Stefano could remotely revoke Chris’ AC license for that criticism…

That being said, does other official game forums do this? And once the console version comes out, how the admins there prove you actually bought it, or will the forums remain strictly for the PC version of AC?

“missing features” you say, like it’s a meaningful rallying cry. I am not you, I don’t want the same things you do. Every sim is missing ‘features’; AC is missing the least out of my personal priority list.

I can’t think of a single developer in this genre that I’d consider likable. They’re all a bunch of pissed off nerds who are incredibly insecure about themselves and the games they create. I suppose they should be, because it seems like these games are just getting worse and worse as time goes on.

I’m long past the mark where I would give a damn about who or what the developer is. Their job is to make decent sims, period. Because it is their job and we are the employers in the long run. If they want to screw with whoever uses their crap, they should at least do that for free.

Makes me wonder why Sector 3 do what they do with PRC but it’s up to Sonat and J-F to hand out the press passes to whomever they like.

@the Anon who stated R3E is complete garbage; seems the real pro’s like Spengler love R3E and donated their free time to improve the DTM 2015 package and Sector 3 has real world pro’s working on the sim from Audi TT, ADAC and GT3 series. So go fuck yourself.

Apparently PRC comments is also the place where you have some power to insult others.

And the ones I see getting butthurt about some devs are the ones who give bullshit to them too. Now when the devs don’t take bullshit from them, those users feel hurt when the dev doesn’t just eat and shuts up like they were used to, so they come to PRC to complain about devs that aren’t nice when themselves weren’t nice in the first place and always stirring up shit about the games, the devs, and other players preferences in a sim against theirs.

I lurk around most other places, and I’ve seen good criticism as well as endless raging from all sides. But here with no moderation – some just go nuts with the ‘shitposting’, sometimes funny, other times just annoying.

Why haven’t I seen an article here so far that only talks objectively about game problems and suggestions of improvement or different ideas, without judgements. Always creating drama in the community, about the games, the devs, and other players.

It is very sad that the norm for games devs now is to release an unfinished product,always in a state of early access.
They can do it tho,because everyone is stupid enough to buy the products on day1,how can this be the norm.
They make a game,release it before it’s ready and use the customer as beta testers,why is it the norm now to have 100s if patches post release,why shouldn’t the product be finished before,and then only release updates to add shut,not to fix stuff that should have already been fixed before release.
SIM racing is in a sad sorry state,I love it,but I some times wish the genre would just fold,then the devs would have to make sure if they want to release a title that it has to be finished.

You’re learning about consumerism and how stupid one has to be engage in it,especially given it’s sorry state.
Sim racers like myself try and talk about the extra realism found in genuine sims,but the typical mindless consumer tries to equalize shitty simcade crap with real sims.

Milestone have been shit for years; their last great sim was SBK 2001 made with EA’s money at a time when World Superbike was the best two wheeled motor-sport on earth. 15 fucking years have passed and Milestone can’t get their shit together!

Since SBK 2001, Milestone have shat out crap game after crap game. MotoGP gave Milestone another shot in 2008 (MotoGP ’08 was shite) and it took until 2013 for the MotoGP series to return into the hands of Milestone…where they’ve created nothing but horseshit.

The SBK people gave up once SBK Generations shipped in 2011 and have been mobile games only.

Capcom gave the console versions to Monumental Games (RIP) who created a 60fps 4xMSAA game engine complete with changeable weather and a career mode straight from Grid. MotoGP ’09/’10 was a little arcade-y and MotoGP ’10/’11 wiped the floor with anything Milestone have made since SBK 2001. Lap records in MotoGP ’10/’11 were about 2-3 seconds faster than the real world..Milestone games are, on average, 6-10+ seconds faster than the real world. So much for realism.

MotoGP 08 was their last good entry. Today it drives a bit stiff but it punishes abusive riding, so it’s most ground on reality. SBK series began “stiffening” how it drove, last one I played and owned was SBK 11. Not that it was good, though. Then the recent MotoGP games are far too exploitable and unreasonable. There is no challenge having supreme braking and balance, and beating track records by 4s.

MotoGP ’08 had more bugs and issues than any other MotoGP game I can remember for the Xbox 360…it was little more than SBK ’08 reskinned. It did nothing for me and is still way behind the efforts of SBK 2001 and GP500 (anyone remember that sim?).

There was a time when that was the only place one could buy these Milestone made games was on console and it appears that’s back to where Milestone want to be given their MotoGP games run poorly on modern PC hardware with the god-awful Yebis PP enabled.

I dunno, Ian Bell is a complete twat, without a doubt, but I think Stefano just can’t do sarcasm well (as well as it can be done through text), and doesn’t take much to get riled up.

Remember the whole VR thing?, refused to look into it seriously and was making fun of the new accounts from reddit?
It was like the next morning or something, I saw someone was mentioning how SteamVR can make the whole process easier for developers, and dude was being nice and suggesting ways to look into it.

And you know what?, Stefano was like “ok, VR might be doable”, same with users asking for a brake-pressure adjustment, started with “why do you need this?, G27 pedals are fine” and has, admittedly, gone ‘slightly’ towards another “we might be able to do this” response.

Fuck it, I’m rambling.
TL;DR – be genuinely nice, get nice response. be a dick – get treated like one.

Pure simulation value doesn’t take you anywhere. There needs to be meaningful purpose which puts the simulation value into context. I believe these are considered as games or entertainment products in the end? In that regards, they fail greatly.

You guys and your obsession with trying to pull stats from steamspy without being able to properly read stats.

87 playing at one data point. 126 peak playing as a second data point. Mean players at any given time on this one day based on available data from this picture is 106.5. If we assume that each player plays for only 1 hour while maintaining this average then the total number of users playing the game in 24 hours is 2556. Now lets assume more realistically that there are off peak times when things are lower and some players play more than 1 hour. So lets just dump 25% off the figure. That means 1917 players played AMS in a 24 hour period.

1917 players on a Sunday doesn’t seem dead to me. Even 1000 players isn’t dead. Add to that the fact that Reiza keeps adding content and they paid for this content with a 100k community crowdfund. If you can pull $100k from a sim’s community how is it dead? Why must a sim’s health be measured by its consistent player base and not its purchasing player base? Many people own AC but only play it after every update or infrequently. Most simmers own many sims and play many infrequently but still buy the product. How does this picture condemn AMS as unhealthy in the realm of sims?

This then works the same for the top games then Going by your Calculations which means then-
Assetto-40428
Dirt Rally-40320
pCARS-32643
RaceRoom-12780
rF2- 2844
Race07-2358
Stock Car extreme-2119
AMS-1917

So going by your estimates, it still proves then that AMS is failing. AMS has just under 5% of what Assetto Corsa has player wise. Stock Car extreme has a marginal better player count over the “Newer Title”

Judging by AC’s online turn1 accidents where people can’t brake in time or just brake too late cause they don’t understand why they should brake earlier in the first corner of the starting lap, the simulation value is over 9000. But is getting better, way better than we can remind from a year ago. Netcode and collision updates helped greatly the overall conditions and results.

You mean those goons who start loudly questioning AC’s simulation value over and over even in articles not related to AC? He need to take a new bait (and it cannot be related to Reiza, since it’s an old bait now).